Praise Dance Camp highlights video

Of all the praise dance classes I’ve taught children over the year, this year’s praise dance camp brought me a particular joy. This group engaged with the spiritual content with more depth of understanding than I have experienced before. Their answers reflected that they have been taught to love and worship the Lord at home and that they truly listened and received the lessons God gave me for them.

In this post, I share several that blessed me and a 3-minute highlight video that brings these comments to life.

When I asked the children, “What is honor?” They one child replied, “When you treat someone with respect because you know that how important they are.”

When I asked them, “What is wonder?” They gave me answers like, “When something is so amazing you can’t describe it.”

When I asked, “Why is gold the color for God’s glory?” they replied, “Because it’s beautiful. Because it’s valuable. Because it is so special.” As I taught them, I learned.

Even so, kids are kids. There were times during what we called “Artistic Worship” (a term I learned from Lynn Hayden to describe a spontaneous time of worship, when the leader directs the worshipers to use props and movement to create a beautiful tapestry of worship) when the girls were vying for props, running and crawling under the billows, and crashing into each other. They weren’t being bad, but they were being silly, making me wonder where their hearts were at those moments.

This was the case at the end of Thursdays’ class. So, I prayed before Friday’s class about how to reach their hearts, how to help them approach our celebration with parents with a true heart of worship.

I began our teaching time on Friday morning by asking the girls, “What is worship?” and “Why do we worship?” Their answers reassured me that, even though their behavior was sillier than I liked the day before, they got the most important lessons from camp. Some of their answers were basic, but nonetheless true, like these:

Worship is thanking God for what He has done.Worship is praising God.Worship is when you glorify God.

Others reflected having truly listened and heard the lessons throughout the week:

Worship is when you use your body to give praise to God.We worship Him because He is the King.We worship him because of His majesty.We worship Him because He did for our sin and made us clean.If you get all dressed up and have a beautiful tiara and an elegant dress, but your heart is hard, it’s empty worship. You can have a plain dress and have your heart full of worship.

And other answers were profound and went deeper than what we had talked about together, bearing witness to the teaching of their parents and the work of the Spirit in their lives:

Worship is when you adore something/someone so much that you would do anything for them.When you worship, God shows you what is inside your heart.

I share this with you so you can celebrate what God is doing in the hearts of children. I share it because many of you prayed for this camp, and I want you to hear how the Lord answered your prayers. And I share them so you can share my joy.

Here is a 3 1/2 minute recap of our week together. I hope you are blessed by it.

If you are looking for tools to help you to teach these concepts to children or adults, here are 7 fantastic DVDs and books by Lynn Hayden from which I gained ideas about concepts, choreography, and activations for this camp:

Amy, thanks so such for sharing what the Lord did through you at Praise Camp. I felt that there was such joy and celebration in their worship and I loved that. I love the colors and the garments and the variety that you taught them. You are a wonderful blessing and you give it your all and you inspire us to do so as well.
Abundant blessings,
Nanette

Hi Annette. I, too, saw purchasing garments as an obstacle. But you do not have to have garments to start a ministry. I taught classes in my community for a fee a few years back, which enabled me to purchase some children’s garments. But for our first presentation, we did not have dresses, I simply asked the children to dress in black and purple. There was a unity to our clothing and the dance was beautiful. Over time, I earned money to purchase garments, a few at a time. For dance camp, the children wore their own clothing. The registration fee included a bit extra to purchase the fabric to make the flags. Then, I lent them my garments. But even without the garments, the children could worship the Lord and share with their parents what they had learned. God owns the cattle on a thousand hills. Begin with what you have and you will be surprised by His provision.